As a founder member of Mystery Women in 1997, promoting Crime Fiction has always been my passion.
Following the closure of Mystery Women, a new group was formed on 30th January 2012 promoting crime fiction.
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Thursday, 23 October 2014

‘The Last Room’ by Danuta Reah

Published by
Caffeine Nights. ISBN: 978-1-907565-74-8 (Paperback)

Danuta Reah is a past master of the art of complex
characters, and the cast she has created for The Last Room is no
exception. The two protagonists, Will, an almost-disgraced retired senior
detective, and Dariusz, a Polish lawyer with a political agenda and a deeply
personal interest in the central storyline, carry the narrative in turn, while
everyone else weaves in and out.

Briefly:
Ania, a voice identification expert, has apparently committed suicide after her
evidence in a key deportation case has been discredited. The retired cop is her
father and the lawyer is her fiancé. Each has his own
reasons for digging deep into the web of intrigue that surrounds Ania’s death, but they dislike each other on sight, which makes
for additional complications.

It
would be easy for the narrative to fall into did-she-jump-or-was-she-pushed
cliché, but Danuta Reah is better than that; the question is, somewhat
inevitably, posed very early on, but it gives rise to many other questions. It
soon becomes clear that there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye, and
everyone has his or her own agenda. The reader, at least this one, is soon
wondering exactly what all these various agendas are.

As
complicated plots go, they don’t come much more complicated than this one.
Past, present and future all have a part to play, but almost to the last few
pages, I was never sure how all the threads were going to come together, and
who the bad guys were.

The
story twists and turns; other well-drawn characters move in and out of the
spotlight; and the drab urban landscape of post-Glasnost Poland forms a
background which makes things even less clear and more complex. All the
settings have a sense of reality. Reah is clearly familiar with the edgy place
eastern Europe has becoming since it emerged from communist lacklustre, and the
quiet Scottish community and noisy English city are just as lifelike.

I
gave up trying to second-guess the convolutions of the plot very early; it was
the characters that kept me hooked. Even the minor ones are sharp and real;
Dariusz’s elderly father, unwell and confined to a dreary flat, and Jack, the
gruff, kind-hearted car park attendant in Will’s remote Scottish village are as
palpable as other with far bigger roles.

I’m
not normally a big fan of conspiracy theory novels, but this one kept me
reading to the last.

------

Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Danuta Reah , who also writes under the name Carla Banks, was born
in South Yorkshire. She comes from an academic family but opted out of formal
education at the age of 16. She worked in a variety of jobs from barmaid to
laboratory assistant, in a variety of locations, including a brief spell in
Kingston, Jamaica. She says "I didn't plan my working life that way, but
it was probably the best apprenticeship a writer could have."She went to university as a mature student
and then went on to teach adults in Further and Higher Education. She taught
linguistics and creative writing, and inthe
course of this, refined her own writing style. "I didn't find my voice
until I started writing crime. My first novel was based on a rather creepy
encounter I had on an empty station platform one evening - it's a story I often
tell when I do author events, but beware: it needs bright lights and a
crowd." She published her first novel in 1999, Only Darkness,
the rights to which have been purchased by Escazal Films. Her novels have been
published internationally: USA, Germany, Holland, France, Sweden, Norway,
Denmark, Italy, Spain, Finland, Czech Republic. Crime - or at least dissent -
runs in the family. Her father was a refugee from Stalin's Belarus; one of her
ancestors, John Woodcock, was hung, drawn and quartered in 1646 for his
religious beliefs.
Danutais married and lives in South
Yorkshire with her artist husband. Sheis past Chair of the Crime Writers' Association. She is a regular
speaker at national and international conferences and literary festivals, and
has appeared on radio and television.

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen,
and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but
never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher
for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now
burgeoning. She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with
books, about half of them crime fiction.

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About Me

From an early age I have been a lover of crime fiction. Discovering like minded people at my first crime conference at St Hilda’s Oxford in 1997, I was delighted when asked to join a new group for the promotion of female crime writers. In 1998 I took over the running of the group, which I did for the next thirteen years.
During that time I organised countless events promoting crime writers and in particular new writers. But apart from the sheer joy of reading, ‘I actually love books, not just the writing, the plot or the characters, but the sheer joy of holding a book has never abated for me. The greatest gift of my life has been the ability to read'.